GLENS FALLS, NY.- The Hyde Collection today installed the 1934 oil painting by Douglass Crockwell (1904-1968) titled Paper Workers, Finch Pruyn & Co.in the Museum’s Birdsall Gallery on the second floor of Hyde House. The painting was donated to the Museum last fall by Mr. and Mrs. Samuel P. Hoopes, of Bolton Landing, New York.

Crockwell was a founding trustee of The Hyde Collection, acted as its first director, and was famous for his illustrative paintings created for such national publications as the Saturday Evening Post, Life, Look, and Esquire. His commercial illustrations were commissioned by such manufacturing and industry giants as General Electric, General Motors, Coca Cola, and Standard Oil. Crockwell lived and worked in Glens Falls from 1932 until his death in 1968.

“The work was sent out for conservation at the Williamstown Art Conservation Center shortly after we received it and it has come back just wonderfully restored. Douglass Crockwell may be most well-known for his commercial illustrations, but this painting is one of several that mark him also as a fine artist and very much a part of the contemporary American art world of the 1930s, which was highly interested in city themes, including machines,” said Hyde Executive Director David F. Setford.

The painting, which depicts two anonymous Finch Pruyn workers smoothing a massive roll of newsprint on a towering paper machine, joins two other Crockwell works in the Museum’s collection. The first, acquired in 1971, is a painted illustration for the Saturday Evening Post and was gifted to The Hyde by Crockwell’s wife and son. The second is an unfinished portrait of Louis Fiske Hyde, which was donated to the Museum in 1979 by Mrs. Crockwell and her family.